The Paulo Freire Legacy

1
The Paulo Freire Legacy

• McGill University
• The Paulo and Nita Freire International Project
  for Critical Pedagogy

2
From the moment I learned that McGill University
was creating The Paulo and Nita Freire
International Project for Critical Pedagogy, I
was very touched. On the one hand, I was pleased
and happy--on the other hand, I was also
concerned about the responsibility this honor
implies and why I am receiving it the greatest
ever bestowed on me, along with the greatest
Brazilian educator, Paulo Freire, whose worldwide
notoriety is undeniable.
3
Questions came to my mind as if to cast doubt on
whether or not I deserved such high homage, on
whether or not I would be able to meet the
expectations placed upon me by those who work so
seriously to perpetuate Paulo Freires name in
the world from Canada. I patiently allowed time
to provide me with an answer, obviously not in
and of itself as if time were a decision-making
entity, but by arriving, little by little, in
time and with time, at the foundation of my own
intuitions and reflections. The first
understanding I arrived at was that Paulo Freire,
my husband and to me simply lovingly PAULO, did
deserve to have a study and research center at a
university of McGills stature, but that Nita did
not. What might I have done to warrant such great
honor?
4
I reflected upon it some more and was then able
to more clearly realize what I represented in
Paulos life. Some friends had long told me, but
not until the creation of this Project did I
realize within myself, acutely and profoundly,
what my presence in Paulos life was. I gave to
him all my love, tenderness, and care. I
encompassed him with my energy and my vitality
with my curiosity, and my concerns, with a
younger womans reading of the world. The manner
in which we exchanged admiration, trust,
fascination, loyalty, and respect also helped him
to open himself up to a new sense of satisfaction
with life, and toward his relationship with the
world.
5
I am thankful to Shirley Steinberg, to Alípio
Casali, and Lisete Arelaro, and very specially to
Donaldo Macedo, for having noticed and
understood, justly and sensibly so, even before I
did myself, and for having repeated to me many
times, and vehemently so, the importance, which I
now very humbly recognize, of my role in
provoking in Paulo the existential intent, indeed
the vital desire, needed so that he could
plentifully enjoy all his dimensions as a man
from his radiant taste for a happy and
pleasurable life to his scientific production,
made more poetic and diversified, more profoundly
critical and accurate.
6
I must agree, being a little less shy about it,
that had it not been for me, quite possibly Paulo
might have faded at a much younger age, and he
would not have contributed as he did in the last
ten years of his life, consistently and
decisively, to building the Critical Pedagogy he
himself had inaugurated.
7
I must say a few more words about why I believe
this Project for studies about Paulo Freire in
Canada also takes my name, and in its Nita form,
which up until my marriage to Paulo was a
nickname, a form of endearment only used by my
family and the closest of friends, Paulo among
them. Therefore, this choice by McGill
University, I feel, has the intent to connect me
with the university in a tender, definitive, and
irreversible manner. Similarly to my relationship
with Paulo, a strong and loving bond both in its
affective and intellective aspects, it intends to
emphasize the undying dimension of our
relationship of love, within the institutional
relationship being established today between
myself, Paulo, and McGill University with the
creation of this Project.
8
In sum, I believe that, both due to this joyous,
provocative, instigating facet of mine that
beneficially reached my husband and to my
immeasurable efforts toward disseminating and
publishing my husbands work as his legal
successor, I am inexorably linked to McGill
University, and being granted such an honor
alongside Paulo.
9
Therefore, my most sincere Thank You goes out to
all the men and women in this university who have
worked to make this Project a reality and to all
those who have come to support and lend their
solidarity to myself and Paulo. I also want to
thank, in a very special way, my sons, Ricardo,
Eduardo, Roberto, and my daughter, Heliana, my
daughter-in-law, Elsie, and my grandson, Andre.
My thanks as well to Shirley Steinberg and Joe
Kincheloe, mentors of The Paulo and Nita Freire
International Project for Critical Pedagogy
Project, to Donaldo Macedo, Henry Giroux, Charles
Cole, Hajra Waheed, Peter McLaren, Ramón Flecha,
Antonia Darder, and Peter Park, any-time,
all-weather friends of Paulos and, through him,
of mine as well.
10
I also thank you all here today for the joy of
your solidarity and your presence. I also want to
express my eternal gratitude to all of McGill
Universitys leadership, and above all to Dean
Jamshid Beheshti.
11
At times like this, it is natural for one to
think of ones life history. Thus, as in a movie,
I now run through my life and Paulos, lives
lived in parallel even before we jointly built
our communion made concrete within the maturity
of our choice and the intensity of knowing how to
live the plenitude of life, while surrounded by
people who are most dear to me.
12
I am taken back to my childhood in Recife The
Osvaldo Cruz School, which stretched out toward
the front of the huge house at 1002 Dom Bosco
Street where we, the Araújos lived Aluízio,
Genove, and their nine children, my brothers and
sisters, my cousin Itamar and my grandfather,
Godfather Miguel. I recall the bucolic Recife
with the gas streetlights and its Carnaval, then
filled with Pierrots and Columbines, confetti,
streamers, and frevo songs of innocent and
romantic taste, which I now hear in the 2008
Carnaval, nostalgically reliving my childhood, at
the University Radio Station created by Paulo in
1963!!
13
I recall the rotating bridge, which made me panic
at the thought of its moving while I was
crossing, the amphibian airplanes letting off
their passengers downtown, and Derby Square with
its Sunday bands, where I started having my first
dates with Raul. I recall my coming to Sao Paulo
and the birth of our four children, whose lives
today continue in those of Andre, Marina, and
Flora. I remember my brother Paulos tragic
death, when the familys pain was somewhat
lessened by the daily visits by then great family
friend Paulo Freire.
14
I remember the day when I made the decision to go
back to schoolin my youth I had completed two
years of Civil and Electric Engineeringto study
Education, which coincidentally allowed me to
dedicate to and specialize myself in the same
field of study as Paulos. It was the iron-handed
years of the military regime then, and I read
Paulo for the first time, in Spanish I could
hear him translate his Pedagogia do Oprimido
back to Portuguese. I was in Sao Paulo he was in
Geneva!
15
I go further back in time to find Paulo around
the year of 1937 I met him for the first time
then, before I was four years of age, in the
halls of the memorable Osvaldo Cruz School, owned
by my parents, Genove and Aluízio Pessoa de
Araújo. It was a private school, but its
practices favored the communitys interests, for
example, through the granting of scholarships it
could indeed be considered a public-mission
institution. That was how Paulo had the
opportunity to go to schooland belatedly
complete his secondary educationand in fact to
become a teacher, then one of his greatest dreams
since childhood.1
1 Among other statements check in Paulo Freire,
Política e Educação, 4th edition. São Paulo
Cortez, 2000 in Ninguém nasce feito é
experimentando-nos no mundo que nós nos fazemos,
p. 79.
16
About such opportunity, Paulo stated that, beyond
the unique and concrete possibility he had to be
schooled, it was there that I learned to
become an intelligent person, which I believe I
am.1 It was at that school that, while making
up for years lost out of school, Paulo learned,
under the influence of my parents, to be a
humanist, in addition to being intelligent and
being human.
1 Paulo Freire. Pedagogia da tolerância. São
Paulo Editora Unesp, 2005, p. 268. This book
earned the Jabuti Prize-2006, awarded to Paulo
and myself, as organizer, in the category The
Best Book on Education, 2nd place.
17
At the time, Paulo, an adolescent who thought of
himself as unattractive and angular, timidly
overcame his fear of interacting with his fellow
students and teachers by singing popular songs or
whistling Villa Lobos, but also by studying the
Portuguese language and popular Brazilian syntax
with steel determination.
18
I recall, with joy and longing, our wedding
ceremony held at my mothers houseunfortunately,
having already passed, my father was not able to
experience the joy of seeing me united to his
dearest former studentin Recife, in March of
1988, at the height of Paulos wisdom, when
filled with passion and love we were formally
united in a religious ceremony so as to complete
one another.
19
I remember the many trips from Sao Paulo to
Jaboatão dos Guararapes, especially the last
vacation we spent together, in January of 1997,
at our condo, which he had bought a few years
before. He seemed to tell everyone in my presence
that the place was meant to trick me and
gradually warm me up to the legitimate dream of
returning to our context of origin. He tried to
convince me by proposing longer and longer stays
there, preparing us for a definitive return to
his beloved Recife, even while he objectively
knew that would be very difficult to do in the
near future due to the work commitments we had
both made in Sao Paulo.
20
He would imagine and promise me a gift of a
large house, in a pleasant section of the city,
one to my taste and of my choice, preferably with
a view to the Capibaribe River, which runs
through and beautifies our city, and with a
large backyard with mango, pitanga, carambola,
and jaca trees in it so we could enjoy their
aromas and flavors while resting or just thinking
under the shades provided by lush and abundant
treetops.
21
I relive all that intensely. My life, his life,
the characters and experiences of our simple and
gentle life, one of intense communion and
decisive for the being that I have been and am
today and that instigates me to think about what
he thought, dreamed, and practiced. Without that
loving and tender bond we forged day after day,
deliberately between us, and without the learning
mutually afforded us by our ten years of a shared
life, it would be difficult to speak about him
with the affective responsibility, with a
companions respect, with political engagement
and an intellectual identity with his reading of
the world, as I have done.
22
Thus, during his life, I collaborated in three of
his books.1 After his departure, I organized
three2 more books with writings of his, and I
had them published and translated into a few
foreign languages. I organized another book about
him with Freireans from around the world, some of
whom are present here.3 I wrote about us in
Chronicles of love my life with Paulo Freire 4
and about his prodigious life and singular body
of work in Paulo Freire uma historia de
vida.5
23
1 Pedagogia da Esperança, São Paulo, Paz e
Terra, 1992 ( 52 Notes, from p.201 to 245)
Cartas a Cristina, São Paulo, Paz e Terra, 1994
(46 Notes, from p. 237 to 334 ) 2nd edition. São
Paulo Editora Unesp, 2002 and .À Sombra desta
Mangueira, São Paulo, Olho D Água, 1995 ( 13
Notes from p. 89 to 120). 2 Pedagogy of
indignation.. Boulder Paradigm Publishers, 2004
Daring to dream toward a pedagogy of the
unfinished. . Boulder Paradigm Publishers, 2007
and Pedagogia da tolerância. São Paulo Editora
Unesp, 2005,Awarded the most important literary
prize in Brazil, Jabuti Prize 2006, The Best
Education Book, 2nd Place. 3 A pedagogia da
libertação em Paulo Freire Paulo Freire Series
(Direction). São Paulo Editora Unesp, 2001. 4
Chronicles of love my life with Paulo Freire.
Preface by Marta Suplicy, Introdution by Donaldo
Macedo. New York Washington, DC Baltimore
Bern Frankfurt Main Berlin Brussel Vienna
Oxford Lang, 2001. 5 Paulo Freire uma
historia de vida. Indaiatuba Villa das Letras,
2006. Awarded the most important literary prize
in Brazil, Jabuti Prize 2007, 2nd Place in the
category The Best Biography.
24
On this solemn occasion, therefore, I want to, I
can and must, because I know him most intimately,
give testimony as to who this small-bodied man is
whose greatness and wholeness of character were
quite uncommon and whose mere presence effected
pedagogy. As I speak about his humanness, I will
also be speaking about his reading of the world,
thus, about the legacy of his work, in light of
the extreme coherence he maintained between what
he felt, observed, reflected upon, spoke,
systematized, wrote, and practiced.
25
From his mother he learned generosity and not to
be afraid of living legitimate anger from his
father tolerance and respect. From my parents he
learned humanism and gratitude. From his students
he learned of the need for spontaneous curiosity
to gradually become epistemological through
loving cognitional dialogue. From a few
philosophers, sociologists, and educators around
the world he learned that sameness does not lead
to rigorous systematized thinking, or to the
creation and re-creation of knowledge, as that
should be a dynamic process historically renewing
itself at every moment.
26
From his academic peers, while negating many of
them, he learned that one must not discard common
sense and intuition, but start out from them in
order to build science and philosophy. He learned
that knowledge is born out of a practice that
must be illuminated by theory in a permanent and
dialectic process from practice to theory to
practice.
27
From his wives, Elza and me, he learned the need
for complicity, for affection and lovingness
within married life. From the African peoples he
learned the importance of bodiliness and of joy,
and of a duty toward and a taste for the
learn-teach act from the starting point of
engaged work toward transformation.
28
Paulo also learned, from northern whites, from
the developed world, those who were (and remain)
in favor of the Brazilian bourgeoisie, and thus,
against the people. By negating them, he
proclaimed, in a dialectic of denunciation and
annunciation, that division leads to manipulation
and conquest, but that through organization,
through union and the cultural synthesis of the
oppressed, the possibility opens up for social
transformations in favor of those men and women,
the excluded, vilipended, and exploited
population.
29
Yet, it was with Recife laborers and fishermen
from Pernambuco that Paulo received and embraced
the greatest lessons on the act of thinking.
From those men and women he learned that neither
theology nor his faith and catholic
religiousness, neither rationalist or idealist,
functionalist or phenomenalist, personalist nor
any other theories of educative-philosophical-ling
uistic knowledge were able to explain in its
totality what he saw, felt, and understood while
in contact with the indigent men and women from
the swamps, the marshes of Recife, and from the
beaches and the countryside of Pernambuco.
30
It was alongside those men and women, the mere
objects for manipulation, exploitation, and
oppression by the dominant, that my husband
humanized himself more, and understood the need
to study a great deal, especially Marxism, in
order to unveil the cruel and unjust reality that
ravaged Brazil, but above all that Northeast
region of his.
31
It was from his experience with the population of
the poor quarters of Recife and with the rural
laborers from the sugar cane producing towns of
Pernambuco that Paulo started out, thus, to
compose his Liberation Theory. He was able to
clearly understand, with that destitute and
ignorant population, through studies in
philosophy and science, and through rigorous
reflection, that they had been robbed of their
humanness, had their genuine nature as human
beings denied them.
32
He understood the reality in which they had been
Lesser Beings, exploited, excluded, oppressed,
because they lived poorly, hardly ate, had no
jobs, and were not able to read the world, or
even able to write or read the wordnot ever
their own names. Illiterate, they did not even
have the right to vote, which might have afforded
them minimal political participation, as such was
the requirement by Brazilian law then.
33
Paulos compassion toward that population and his
radical understanding of the conditions they were
subjected to made him be in their favor,
compelled him to make them conscious of why they
felt undervalued, resigned to divine
determination, dismissed from life. Through
conscientization as to their day-to-day of
misery, he opened up the possibility for them to
fight against that suffering, which silenced
their voices as historical beings and sentenced
them to being mere objects at the service of the
powerful.
34
From all such men and women, from the most
diverse peoples of the world, Paulo learned that
solidarity and tolerance are the matrixes of true
multiculturalism, upon which earthly Peace can be
built, without arrogance, without
discriminations, and without bouts of domination
by the pretentious lords of the world.
35
Paulo was a simple man even though he was a wise
man who studied and read with all the
potentiality of his epistemological curiosity,
with great seriousness and feeling, devoting
himself from an early age to overcoming
relationships and conditions of oppression in
effect. He learned to listen to scientists and
to hear the people of his land. He heard them
because he listened to what manual laborers,
factory and rural workers and fishermen in
Pernambuco wanted, knew, wished for, and felt.
36
As he listened to them, he took it all to his
heart, reflecting upon and feeling their
problems, because he read with his entire
bodybody and mind, he read with his conscious
body. His body hair would rise up, and his heart
would race pumping his blood faster because he
identified with the peoples pain. He would
become stunned and indignant.
37
Paulo, therefore, wrote about peoples troubles
and their suffering with a legitimate anger or
indignation, as he would say, but without
grudges, disrespect, or exasperation. His
enormous joy for living never kept him from
speaking about the miseries of the world, nor his
being one of the most serious and rigorous
thinkers in the history of ideas and of education
in the world from preserving his almost boyish
ways of communicating, of conducting himself with
sweetness and simplicity toward anyone indeed, to
the last day of his life.
38
Paulos ethical nature is to account for his
exemplary behavior, for only after analyzing what
he heard, read, or saw, living it all within his
reflective reasoning, and within instances of
anger and indignation if he repudiated the fact
or deed, would he then lovingly denounce it,
thusly announcing something new. For that
reason, he was not always going on or grieving in
elegies or vain words. He would first
intuitively and sensitively learn from the facts
and deeds that sentenced the majorities, or him,
to the limits or depths of meanness. He gave
himself the right to profoundly feel legitimate
angers, as he put it, and then, he would
elaborate the facts scientifically and
politically in his talks always marked by ethical
composure.
39
Such is the dynamic of denunciation-annunciation
in Paulo, his educator, political, ethical being.
Therefore, I never saw him complaining, even
when treated unjustly or misunderstood by anyone.
He was able to discern and lucidly knew the
reasons why someone would want to discriminate
against, subject, or demean the people or to
offend him, put him down, without having ever
compared the insults and injuries and the acts
of envy independently from their reasons why and
whom they emanated from. At times he was
mistaken, but he never regretted his
magnanimousness toward people.
40
With clarity and dignity, he would remain in his
authentic and eminently ethical position of
humility, even while denouncing the dominant
classes with all his strength. Paulos state of
ethical discernment provided him the foundation
for creating a political epistemology driven by
the concreteness of life, of deeds and facts and
their webs, one substantively humanist and
critical, thus, inaugurating a new conception of
ethics, creating the ethics of liberation.
41
It is this ethics in Paulo that accounts,
therefore, for the unshakable love and
unrestricted solidarity toward the just, the
oppressed and excluded that sets the tone and
provides the soul of his own person, of his
theory and praxis. He abominated with all his
strength the envious, the vengeful, and those who
take advantage of their positions to illicitly
gain in every way in every situation. He also
possessed enormous compassion for men and women
who dont know how to stand firm in their
positions when respectful of the decisions of
others or loyal toward their comrades.
42
Paulo was, thus, a bold man who was not afraid to
hardheadedly insist, to continue on writing,
speaking, and dedicating his life to the struggle
against injustices that afflict men and women
without a voice more, that is, that afflict those
who cannot speak their word. Speaking the word,
to him, means to demand what one wants, desires,
needs, to take a stand for what one thinks and
finds necessary for his or her life in community.
It means to want and to understand that one can
and must participate in the political life of
ones country rather than simply being the docile
one who works and obeys without even knowing why.
To speak the word is to insert oneself in
society it is to establish ones own biography.
It means to escape the condition of mere object
to gain that of subject of history as well.
43
Paulos struggle of nearly sixty years was,
unarguably, toward making lives into human
existences, toward making oppressed men and women
into More Beings, that is, in fact people,
socially recognized as equal and marked only by
their individual differences. Paulo was
stubborn, persistent not just to be a
troublemaker, but rather out of his belief that
all human beings, men and women, are born to be
happy. They are born to fulfill themselves while
human beings, by doing well, seriously, decently,
and joyfully all that they like and want to do
because it is important for their society and not
just for themselves.
44
Often times, his ethical-critical-political
educational theory is misinterpreted as if it
were a mere method for literacy education. His
critical understanding of education, his
epistemology, has a literacy education method
built into it, it is true, but it goes far beyond
that and encompasses other areas of knowledge,
interpreting human existence in and with he world
in an absolutely peculiar dialectic fashion.
Through his theory, Paulo revolutionized the
world, without weapons, with courage and
boldness, with coherence and complicity, with
political ethics and love it is a Liberating
Theory aimed at human beings autonomy.
45
His theory brought humanist-liberating power to
education, to the act of educating the forum of
politicalness, problematics, and dialogicalness,
and to politics it brought a new
ethical-pedagogical character, as those qualities
were not recognized before.
46
Marked by the ethics of life, his theory negates
the ethics of markets, of easy and illicit gain,
which is characteristic of those who practice the
dictums of neoliberalism and of economic
globalization. It is a critical and liberating
theory because it proposes thinking and acting
toward the transformation of societies it is
hopeful because, while believing in human
inconclusion and in collective participation
toward the building of a better world, it
foresees the utopia of a more just and human
society.
47
It is dialogically loving because it does not
prescribe and does not determine but, rather,
establishes a horizontal relationship in the
search for knowledge and for well-liking between
subjectivities and the objectivity of what is to
be unveiled and known. It is humble because it
does not intend itself as the only true theory at
the service of men and women and tolerant because
it values and respects differences. It is
engendering of conscientization, geared toward
the autonomy of subjects, because its citizenly
tactics has democracy as its greater strategy.
In sum, Paulos theoretical thought exposes all
his greatness, wholeness, and dignity of an
existentialized human being.
48
Paulos greatest dream, therefore, was the
reinvention of societies toward the prevalence of
justice and equality in them, thus making them
truly democratic societies. That is, it aims at
our building a more ethical, more human world.
Just as Martin Luther King, he also pronounced,
with his conscious body, with his work, and with
his example, I have a dream I have a possible
dream, that of humanizing ourselves, in
communion, of men and women freeing ourselves
from the unjust bondage that has made us Lesser
Beings. I have a dream I have a possible dream,
that of all of us men and women becoming More
Beings, in a permanent process of liberation.
49
In other words, Paulo created a theory of
knowledge from draining theoretical studies, from
his prophetic intelligence, drenched by his
experiences as a man who fully lived his
Recifeanness, his unrestricted and profound love
for his homeland, for his context of origin,
but above all from his sensibility soaked in
compassion and solidarity toward the Marias,
Manuels, Joses, Severinas, and Severinos from the
hills and the marshes of Recife, the fishermen,
and the sugar-cane plantation workers of
Pernambuco.
50
Thusly, fighting fearlessly from the starting
point of his Recifeanness, but never stuck in it,
with courage and a belief in the other, he made
himself a citizen of the world, a well known man,
admired, respected, studied, and cited all over
the world, by scholars from the most varied areas
of knowledge.
51
From Recife to Montreal, from Santiago to La Paz,
from Havana to Geneva, from New York to Beijing,
from Tokyo to Massachusetts, from Jakarta to
Barcelona, from Sao Paulo to Seoul, from Kiev to
BilbaoPaulo is considered the thinker of Brazil
who, having thought from the starting point of
his dearest city, Recife, where he was born in
1921, reached the world. It is necessary to say,
and I do so with pride, but without pretension or
arrogance, that my husband, alongside
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, is considered the greatest
pedagogian in the history of education and of the
ideas of humanity, according to statements by
liberation philosopher Enrique Dussel.
52
This homage, as I see it, commemorates this mans
immortalityPaulo Freirewho thought, fought, and
dreamed tirelessly, throughout his life, in favor
of the utopia of transforming the world, through
collaboration and communion, into a more
beautiful and fraternal society, one more just,
more egalitarian, and more solidary, a world of
Peace and equity and a more democratic one.
53
I cry his absence and exalt and rejoice in his
fruitful life, marked as it was by tenderness,
courtesy, and the patience for listening. I
commend his joyfulness, humility, simplicity,
generosity, and respect for all men and women,
regardless of nationality, religion, language,
ethnicity, race, gender, sexual orientation, age,
or culture, his easygoing and hopeful nature, his
wisdom for dialoguing and creating. I admire him
for his enormous capacity for being tolerant
toward the different and lenient about the
frailties of others, for having been wise about
the difficulties of life, for never having
lamented or complained about the problems that
affected him.
54
I also admire him for his awareness of his own
knowledge at the service of transformation, of
understanding as to the incessant remaking of
history through possible actions in the present,
and for having fought against todays
impossibilities to make them into the possible
dreams of tomorrow. I praise him for having
realized that the world is possibility rather
than historic determinism and that impatient
patience is one of the most important
revolutionary virtues, for having loved
indiscriminately, and for having shown
extraordinary courage to love! Nita Ana Maria
Araújo Freire. Jaboatão dos Guararapes, Carnaval
Sunday, 2008. Montreal, March 13, 2008.